Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, FEB. 11, 1936. MR ANTHONY EDEN.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 62, 11 February 1936, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, FEB. 11, 1936. MR ANTHONY EDEN.

SiGJ\ T oit Mussolini’s? pet aversion in the field of international politics and diplomacy is, probably, Mr Anthony Eden, for this clever young Englishman has checked 11 Duee at almost every point of Mussolini’s ill-starred adventure in Abyssinia. Mr Eden is the youngest British Eoreign Secretary for 84 years. He is just 38 years and seven months old — two months younger than Lord Rosebery when he became Eoreign Secretary in the Gladstone Ministry of 1886. In the past 100 years there has been one younger. That was the Earl of Granville, who became Eoreign Secretary in 1851, at the age of 36. A well-informed writer recalls that Mr Eden, the only snrviving brother of Sir Timothy Eden, eighth baronet of West Auckland,, • and sixth baronet of Maryland, has all the antecedents which go to the making of Eoreign Secretaries. He comes of a North Country family which ti-aces its ancestry back to the early part of the fifteenth century. The English baronetcy dates from 1672. The Maryland title avus given to the third baronet, wlxo Avas appointed Governor of Maryland in the first year of the War of Independence. Through his mother he is a great-grand-nephew of Earl Grey, of Reform Bill fame. On his Avife’s side he is connected with the banking family of Beckett.

Mr Eclen went to Eton in 1911. He was a captain in the King’s Rifle Corps and served throughout the Great War, winning the Military Cross. After the War he went to Oxford, where he distinguished himself by learning Persian. Since he first entered Parliament in 1923 he has specialised in foreign affairs. His appointment in 1926 as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Sir Austen Chamberlain enabled him to obtain a close insight into the work of the Foreign Office. When the National Government was formed in 1931, Mr Eden received his first office as OnderSecretary for Foreign Affairs, and matters concerned with the League of Nations claimed the bulk of his attention. Much of his time was spent at Geneva on the work of the Disarmament Conference. When, in 1934, it seemed as if agreement on some' modified form of the British Draft Convention might be m sight, Mr Eden was despatched on the first of his tours to the European capitals. It was then that he was given the higher rank as Lord Privy Seal, though he had no seat in tlie Cabinet. The experiment of dual Foreign Office representation came with the transference of Sir John Simon from the Foreign Office, at a moment when Mr Baldwin was weighing his choice between the appointment of Mr Eden or Sir Samuel Hoare to the Foreign Secretaryship. As Lord Privy Seal, Mr Eden became Britain’s most widely-travelled Minister — almost an ambassador at large. During the past year lie lias had personal interviews with Herr Hitler in Berlin, with M. Stalin in Moscow, with the late Marshal Pilsudski in Warsaw, and with Sinor Mussolini in Rome. He is fully familiar with all the problems that confront him in the Foreign Office, while on matters concerning the League of Nations and its procedure he is an accepted master. This young man’s future seems clear, tor like the late Lord Rosebery he seems destined one day to be Prime Minister of England. Of such men is the British Cabinet composed. What a contrast to what obtains in the British Dominions, where, only too frequently, brains are of little Value compared with fulsome and futile promises at the hustings.